Yesterday evening I went to start the observatory as usual and ran into a rather unusual issue. To set things clear I use ACP/MaxIm/FocusMax/APCC to image with. I’ve used this for a long time with minor issues. Yesterday ACP Scheduler started the startup like always and everything appeared fine until the end. Usually the last thing is it unparks the mount. Here’s where it gets foggy. ACP is sitting there waiting forever to unpark the mount and nothing happens. At this point ACP can’t be aborted so it just sits and waits. The telescope is and has been connected and APCC is showing just that. I look at APCC and go to the park tab and tell it to unpark from last park position. Nothing, try again and a message flashes that says background activity…….or something to the sorts. I can not unpark the mount although I am connected. Connected via the LAN with Serial backup. I open the ASCOM driver and it says I’m connected but I see where it says COM Port 12. Wasn’t sure that was correct. A number of different attempts have happened at this point and I finally go through the list of COM Ports in the driver and when I get to COM 10 it connects. I try to unpark and it works….great except now ACP Expert won’t. That’s a story Bob and I will be working on shortly.

So what could have happened that changed the COM port in the driver/APCC? If the telescope was connected as indicated why couldn’t it be unparked?

-Steve